Schlumberger Chooses RS/6000 SP for Seismic Imaging Centers

01/03/2000

Schlumberger has selected the IBM RS/6000 SP for its major seismic depth imaging centers in Houston and Gatwick, UK. The Houston center has installed a 40-node RS/6000 SP, delivering more than 64 gigaflops (64 billion floating-point operations per second) and has plans to add 16 additional nodes. The Gatwick center has installed a 16-node RS/6000 SP, with a processing output of more than 25 gigaflops. Each system employs more than two terabytes of IBM SSA RAID disk.

Seismic depth imaging addresses the complex problems in geological analysis encountered in the search for oil and natural gas. It requires extremely powerful computers that are able to handle floating-point-intensive algorithms and terabytes of data.

The new systems are built from the current generation POWER3 SMP Node, which is the follow-on to IBM’s POWER2 Super Chip (P2SC) technology. The POWER3 SMP Node is offered as a one- or two-way processor node and contains two memory card slots that provide up to four gigabytes of memory. Designed to meet the challenges of seismic processing, the POWER3 SMP system offers floating-point performance along with high memory bandwidth.